After all these years, we still export logs

All our eggs (and milk, meat and timber) are in one basket. Let’s mix it up a little

More than bees dance in the clover. Our top-performing seven
revenue-generating merchandise exports are commodities: dairy, meat,
timber and logs, fish, kiwifruit, wine and oil. Agricultural primary
production is the long-term leader of the pack. While most
manufacturing is in the past, oil is on the rise. Texas Tea is strong
and black but there’s an ocean’s-worth of Taranaki Tea, a heady
cocktail that includes milk.

Perhaps alarmingly, there is a cloud to this silver lining. Over the
past 20 years, the percentage of New Zealand’s merchandise export
revenue that comes from our top seven commodities has grown from 30 to
50 percent. Simply put, this means New Zealand’s economy is reliant on
fewer and fewer industries, with a lack of diversity and therefore
robustness of the overall economy. Recent research by BERL* highlighted
this trend and its dangers as we continue swimming (or drowning) in
milk and floating logs abroad to be made into valuable somethings by
someone else, somewhere over there.

Sources: Statistics NZ, BERL, IPONZ

A decade of knowledge economy thinking in New Zealand appears to
have done little to broaden our possibilities and spread our talents.
We spread butter instead. The trend for registration of new ideas,
whether trademarks, patents or designs, continues downwards. A negative
correlation may exist between the rise in commodities as a percentage
of exports and the fall in intellectual property protection, as there
are many factors at work here. The ominous possibility of a link
between these two trends, however remote, is thought provoking if not
downright scary.

Innovation and creativity-led economic transformation appears to
have taken the road of least resistance. Urban, ideas-driven creative
industries are stimulating activities, but adding value to traditional
primary sector industries is happening more and more. Softer butter is
better, smarter ice cream is sweeter. This may be cold comfort, though,
when faced with the prospect of the many clever things yet to be
imported while our export basket contains fewer eggs.

It’s time to get cracking in this fool’s paradise.

Jason Smith is a PhD scholar at AUT University
studying New Zealand’s creative economy. He lives on the shores of the
Kaipara, which is undoubtedly a paradise